JMR 8TB Storage Array Empowers Post Production Process From HoneyShed

JMR Electronics, Inc. announced that its BlueStor External PCIe RAID Storage System with PeSAN Technology has been in use at HoneyShed as part of their post production process.

HoneyShed, which will launch in Q3 of this year, is the first interactive web site designed to connect a generation that lives online to the popular large brands they love via world-class video content. The website’s look and feel is similar to QVC meets MTV and targets a wide expanse of the younger demographic, selling everything from hip clothing and high-tech gadgets to a Volvo C30 car. "We have been very busy refining our website and doing a great deal of production and post production work in preparation for our official launch later this year," said Jonathan Parkman, post production supervisor at HoneyShed. "We recently required an upgrade to our main storage repository and were referred to JMR’s BlueStor by Gavin Rosenberg of Sunstar Company, an Inglewood, CA based reseller. JMR’s BlueStor proved to be the ideal storage platform to help improve our post production editing workflow — the BlueStor product and the company are very impressive."

HoneyShed had previously used two non-scalable eSATA Direct Attached Storage arrays connected to a Mac workstation with Final Cut Pro and Pro Tools, called the Assistant Edit Station, to store their content. The Assistant Edit Station was in turn connected to a Gigabit Ethernet switch and network to four other Edit Bays, each with a similar Final Cut Pro enabled Mac workstation equipped with 2TB of internal storage. Firewire drives were used to transport raw footage from the DVCPRO HD cameras to the main storage repository where the content could be accessed by the edit workstations. During the initial few months, the camera crews were doing four camera shoots, one shoot per time at four to five per week, for one to two weeks straight. "We were shooting faster than we were editing and with up to 100GB of video footage per shoot and hundreds of shoots being loaded into the eSATA arrays, we were quickly hitting their capacity limits," added Drew Coombs, assistant editor at HoneyShed. The company in turn replaced the eSATA arrays with an 8TB BlueStor PeSAN storage array to act as the main storage repository. "JMR’s BlueSto storage array was incredibly easy to setup, provides massive capacity expansion, has more bandwidth than we’ll ever need and at a competitive price point that sets it apart from the competition. We are using the BlueStor(TM) array and Mac combination as a centralized storage, content management and distribution tool to store all of our raw and finished video segments. We have about 90 video segments still to cut and the array has performed flawlessly — it’s been fantastic."

JMR’s BlueStor PeSAN Technology is a wide bandwidth, high performance expandable storage using a switched architecture that avoids costly storage bus bridges or components like SCSI or Fibre Channel. The feature-rich direct attached or networked attached BlueStor solution utilizes off-the-shelf PCIe RAID cards from a variety of popular manufacturers, all of whom are 100 percent compatibility tested. SAS or SATA disk drives can be used interchangeably in the array allowing for very diverse customization options. Disk drives are installed vertically rather than horizontally to improve SAS signal integrity and to maximize airflow, resulting in the coolest-operating disk drives possible. Only one multilane cable is used in the data path in order to maintain the flexibility of interchangeable RAID controllers. The PeSAN solution delivers extremely high performance and availability and its cost-efficient implementation drives storage costs down to well below one dollar per Gigabyte.

"JMR’s BlueStor has significantly reduced our dependency on ‘sneaker-netting’ content from station to station and has helped improve our post production workflow efficiency," concluded Parkman. "The time savings alone from having the content readily accessible in real-time have helped to reduce our post production times and our ‘time-to-market’ window, a win-win for all."